This work aims to evaluate the environmental loads of a hypothetical solar cooling plant making a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis. In this study, an LCA of a solar cooling plant for a cold room installed in a fruit and vegetable company is performed. The plant is equipped with an absorption chiller of 150 kW and an auxiliary boiler of 50 kW. The hot water storage tank is 5000 l as the cold water one. The solar thermal field is 250 m2 using evacuated tube collectors. The functional unit of the study is the entire plant. The entire life cycle is evaluated assuming that the lifetime is equal to 20 years. The Ecoinvent v3.8 database is used to collect data and SimaPro v.9 software is used to perform the analysis. IPCC 2013 and ReCiPe 2016 are chosen as impact assessment methods and their results are evaluated. The results show that the total CO2 equivalent emissions that are given by the Global Warming Potential evaluation using IPCC 2013 method increase when solar fraction decrease. Therefore, reducing gas consumption and, also, improving plant solar fraction is the most important way to reduce the total emission. However, the solar plant emissions are related to the installation, maintenance and use phases.
Life Cycle Assessment for a solar cooling plant
Buonomo B.;Manca O.;Nardini S.;Plomitallo R. E.
;Vigna S.
2022
Abstract
This work aims to evaluate the environmental loads of a hypothetical solar cooling plant making a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis. In this study, an LCA of a solar cooling plant for a cold room installed in a fruit and vegetable company is performed. The plant is equipped with an absorption chiller of 150 kW and an auxiliary boiler of 50 kW. The hot water storage tank is 5000 l as the cold water one. The solar thermal field is 250 m2 using evacuated tube collectors. The functional unit of the study is the entire plant. The entire life cycle is evaluated assuming that the lifetime is equal to 20 years. The Ecoinvent v3.8 database is used to collect data and SimaPro v.9 software is used to perform the analysis. IPCC 2013 and ReCiPe 2016 are chosen as impact assessment methods and their results are evaluated. The results show that the total CO2 equivalent emissions that are given by the Global Warming Potential evaluation using IPCC 2013 method increase when solar fraction decrease. Therefore, reducing gas consumption and, also, improving plant solar fraction is the most important way to reduce the total emission. However, the solar plant emissions are related to the installation, maintenance and use phases.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
